This morning, I caught up with the jury foreman, John Harris, who is also a local probate and estate-planning lawyer.

“I’d say it was more the city’s lack of evidence that they really were being diligent about hearing his grievances,” Harris said. “Nobody could untie themselves from the idea that Alex Wong (Stephens’ manager in the public works department) wanted to retaliate for all the grievances in some way or another, and he found a way.”

During the 2009 layoffs, Wong was called upon by city officials to recommend which positions would be cut within his unit, which was in part devoted to maintaining school zone traffic blinkers. Stephens’ attorney, Corinna Chandler, showed that Wong’s recommendations changed during the course of Stephens’ grievances (which, as city officials pointed out, also coincided with the progression of the city’s budget process).

City officials asserted that such recommendations focused on positions, and that they were essentially blind to which specific employees would have to go. Chandler argued that the setup allowed Wong to game the system by justifying a pink slip for Stephens’ position, when his ulterior motive was really to get rid of Stephens personally. As Chandler’s argument went, Wong’s recommendation on which positions to cut was accepted with little scrutiny up the chain.

City Manager Mary Suhm made the opposite argument in her testimony, saying department managers had little latitude in their layoff recommendations, and that they faced intense scrutiny from above to justify those recommendations. To Chandler’s contention that the 2009 layoff process was “decentralized,” Suhm replied, “That’s not how I’d characterize it, no.”Continue reading →